Mammoth, Flatlans, Hewn, by Seher Shah and Randhir Singh

MAMMOTH:

Aerial landscape proposals are a collaboration between the photographer Randhir Singh and artist Seher Shah. The aerial photographs, taken while flying over United States, are combined with black forms that partially block out the image of the landscape. The works are about simultaneous gesture of erasure and construction, creating ambiguously scaled structures that respond to the repetitive patterns inherent in urban planning and architecture.

FLATLANDS:

Flatlands drawing series (is a deployment of) repetitive minimalist lines to demarcate ground, against which architectural forms emerge. The multiple horizontal lines are bracketed by isometric volumes and scored with an intermittent mark-making composed of small vertical arcs and lines. These volumes and marks striate the picture plane, producing a layered and complex visual puzzle, in which space dilates and contracts dimensionally between the ground and perspectival space.’ (Iftikhar Dadi, 2017).

HEWN:

Hewn is a series of woodcuts where shapes and volumes feel both ancient and modern, transcending time and history while still bearing their considerable weight. Stylized but symbolic, they suggest an archaic language or a set of prehistoric metalworking tools. Dense anvil-like forms are scoured with indentations, grooves, and cutaways. (Murtaza Vali, 2016).

Trained in both art and architecture, Seher Shah simultaneously evokes both these traditions of drawing in her artistic practice, using a personal and rigorous formalism to trouble the otherwise rational language of architectural drawing. Shah first deconstructs an architectural edifice into it’s constituent elements and then deploys this idiosyncratic lexicon of abstracted fragments poetically, constructing new words and sentences driven not by a need for building viable structures but by imagination, intuition and material exploration. Her work has been exhibited at several international institutions including the Centre Pompidou, The Museum of Modern Art, Nasher Museum, Utah Museum of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, House of World Cultures, AMOA-Art House, The Jones Center, Glasgow Print Studio, Queens Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum and the Kiran Nader Museum of Art amongst others. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, Devi Art Foundation, Deutsche Bank Art Contemporary, the Progressive Art collection, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation, Vienna, Austria), amongst others.

Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur

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